If you want to write SEO content with the aim to improve your search engine ranking, increase organic traffic and drive users users that have high chances of converting to clients, then you need more than just the usual SEO content writing tips suggested here and there.
You need the right SEO tools that will make this task easier for you, save you tens of hours and help you create content that converts at the same time!
Before giving you information about a powerful content marketing toolkit that will help you write SEO content, it’s extremely important for you to understand that when planning your content (yes there is planning stage) you have to be planning with your target audience in mind.
THINK ABOUT IT
Why write a piece of content that ranks among the Top-10 on Google but attracts low number of clicks or never converts visitors to clients?
It's all about your target audience
You want your content to be ranked high but also to be seen by the right people, your target audience. That is the purpose of writing SEO content anyway: to be “findable” on search engines by your potential clients or audience.
If you are one of those therefore, that thinks SEO is a ranking competition and your aim is to use the right tips to rank high please change your approach now and start thinking “content marketing”!
Why embrace the content marketing approach? because not only it helps in writing content for the right audience, but also in creating content of value for your audience.
Such an approach will in return increase the credibility of your brand, increase shares on social media, and increase time on page. The last one is a strong signal for search engines to rank you high.
How do you do that then? How do you write SEO content that achieves high rankings and that is ideal also for your target audience?
WRITE SEO CONTENT
Table of Contents
SEO Content Planning
You achieve that by following first of all a proven successful SEO content planning process:
- Research topics and keywords and find popular ideas and headlines
- Identify questions that your audience asks (about the topic of interest)
- Do a content gap analysis to identify your competitors content, find gaps and avoid similar content
- Shortlist the topics and subtopics that have high or good SEO potential
Now, these are only for the planning stage.
As you develop your content you want to make sure that your content is also SEO friendly, it’s easy to read, it includes the right number of keywords without overdoing it and it has the right length and appropriate tone of voice.
SEMrush Content Marketing Toolkit
The SEMrush content marketing toolkit includes a set of tools that helps you write SEO content for conversions! It includes not just tools to help you with the SEO planning process as described above but also in many other ways.
Using the SEMrush Content Marketing Toolkit you can plan, write and analyze SEO content all in one place. I’ll go through each feature of the toolkit that is related to writing SEO content and explain how it can be of help to you.
Find out more about SEMrush
Founded in 2008 SEMrush is globally recognized and has won several accolades as the best SEO software suite. It is considered one of the best SEO tools and is used by both companies across all industries. Visit the SEMrush website
Topic Research
Start your research on a topic you want to research further and find ideas on articles, headlines and subtopics. Simply enter the topic into the topic research box and let SEMrush generate ideas for you but also discover the top questions people ask on a topic.
You can even find location-based content ideas. Once you get the results from your search you have different ways to view data and make decisions.
You can see an overview of the important headlines and questions or even a card view that arranges the results in all the main topics. Click on a topic to get further results and the best ideas for each, top questions for each as well as related searches.
Select to filter the results by Volume, Difficulty or Topic Efficiency. Easily list first the subtopics that are trending and save the ideas. Especially the Topic Efficiency option is the one to help you find keywords with the highest potential.
When you finish with your selection of subtopics, headlines and questions you can start creating your content.
Remember that at this stage you are doing a research for the purpose to generate ideas. You will use your selections as ideas, you are not copying any content from other sources.
Let’s see now how the content template feature can help you write SEO content.
Try Topic Research for FREE
Try the SEMrush Topic Research for 7 days FREE. It comes with 40+ tools including 3 projects, 500 keywords to track, 100,000 pages to crawl, PDF export.
SEO Content Template
The content marketing toolkit of SEMrush includes a Content Template which as the name suggests provides you with a template in order to create content that is optimized for the search engines.
Once you enter a keyword a template will be generated that will include:
- The recommended text length,
- A number that tells how easy or difficult it is to read your text text (readability score),
- Semantically related keywords you have to to include,
- Potential backlink targets
Recommended Text Length
With the recommended text length you basically know how much into details you need to get into for each topic. Why is that important? Because that is a crucial factor for Google and for achieving high rankings.
Getting into details and writing in-depth content is what Google likes. Writing content that has value requires research and of course only if you know your topic. That is why Google “favors” such content.
They are looking to rank high, content (pages) of authors that know what they are writing about because after all that is better for the users of the search engine too (providing the best possible search engine results to them).
FREE ONLINE COURSE
SEMrush Content Marketing Toolkit
9 exclusive video lessons with passionate digital marketer Ashley Ward. Become a confident user of the SEMrush Content Marketing toolkit in just 3 hours.
This course was prepared by a team of skilled SEMrush professionals to provide you with the most relevant and up-to-date knowledge on SEMrush Content Marketing Tools.
The course is 100% free. Save your money for your future marketing activities.
• Module 1: Content Analysis and Optimization
• Module 2: Content Research and Ideation
• Module 3: Content Distribution
• Module 4: Content Performance and Management
Readability Score
Is your content easy to read? Remember what I said at the beginning about ranking high on search engines but also converting users to leads or clients?
If your content is difficult to read then don’t expect that your will be converting any users at all.
That is why the SEMRush Content Marketing Toolkit includes such features. Because what would be the point to rank high if the users visiting your pages leave without taking any action?
Semantically Related Keywords
Based on analysis of your Top-10 competitors (top 10 ranking pages) for the selected keyword, Content Template provides you with a list of related keywords or general words they use.
This can help you outline and better plan the content of your page. You can identify the most important ones and then break down your content based on these topics.
These could also be additional keywords to optimize your content for. Why is that? Because a page doesn’t only attract keywords for the one, the focus keyword only that you’ve used. That is why you should be optimizing your pages for various subtopics too and so that you attract the maximum traffic possible.
You can understand therefore that the Semantically related keywords feature can help you not only write SEO content but increase the traffic on your website too.
Potential Backlink Targets
Everyone knows that backlinks are a strong signal for a web page to rank high. Part of optimizing therefore your content for the search engines is not only to write in an SEO friendly way but also to help your page rank high by creating the appropriate backlinks.
The Content Template helps you do just that by recommending potential websites you could create a backlink to your site.
It actually provides you with a list of all the domains you should try and acquire a backlink from.
Quick Checker & Writing Assistant
With the SEO Content Template you can optimize your content for the search engines in real-time.
Find instantly through the Quick Checker the SEO score of your content as you write it or simply paste it into the Quick Checker box.
Make all your changes as per the recommendation in order to really write SEO content that also outranks your competitors.
Combine it with the SEO Writing Assistant (another tool of the content toolkit) and see in real-time different metrics that affect the optimization of your content for the search engines:
- Overall Score
- Readability,
- SEO,
- Originality,
- Tone of voice
Get instant SEO recommendations with regard to the usage of the target keyword as well as on readability.
Google Docs add-on
SEO Content Template integrates with Google docs so that you can continue to use your favorite word editor to write your content. The SEO Writing Assistant has also an add-on for WordPress.
SEO Content Template in combination with the SEO writing assistant are the two tools you really need in order to write SEO content and analyze your competitors content too.
All the recommendations actually are based on the top 10 ranking pages for your given keywords in a given location.
All the tips you find on writing SEO content are incorporated in the mechanisms of these two tools. Everything you need before publishing a post but most importantly when you plan a post are part of the SEMrush content marketing toolkit.
For example you can identify Title issues (character limits) and Content issues including long paragraphs, hard sentences and complex words.
Content Analyzer
Let’s talk now about a part of SEO content writing that many people and even SEO professionals neglect: Post-publication SEO content analysis.
You’ve finished writing your content, you’ve optimized it for the search engines. What’s next? Do you think that’s all there is to the process of writing SEO content?
A lot of people are looking for tips to write SEO content but they neglect some important parts of SEO, especially the post publication factors that affect your ranking:
- How do you know how well your content is performing?
- How do you know if it’s time to review your content?
- How do you know if it’s time to update your content?
You see, content marketing goes beyond simply writing for the search engines. It’s also about maintaining a strong brand online. That means you don’t just publish content and you forget about it.
The SEMrush content marketing toolkit helps you build a strong brand online and set marketing goals for every piece of content by properly monitoring its performance.
The Content Audit report of Content Analyzer keeps you on track with these goals and keeps you up-to-date on how your content is performing or recommends changes whenever is necessary.
It includes a Content Audit tool as well as a Content Post Tracking tool to help you with that. You get an overview of all your pages and you can see in one look if there is a need to:
- Rewrite or remove pages
- Update pages
- Review pages
It also identifies pages with poor content.
The Post Tracking reporting of Content Analyzer now has a different objective: To help you keep track of how well your content is performing.
You can review all your articles and find important information such as:
- The number of you target keywords from your posts that you currently ranking in the top 100 of the search results
- The number of times an article of yours has been shared on social media platforms
- The number of backlinks back to your articles
- The number of potential people that an article has reached
You can of course get detailed information about each article. It’s all about quality content. That’s why Content Analyzer is such an important tool in writing SEO content.
You want to measure how your articles are performing so that you improve their quality in all aspects in order to reach their maximum exposure.
20B Keywords & 20M ideas for single keywords
SEMrush has the largest keyword database on the market! You can segment your terms by topic and perform a detailed analysis of collected keywords to pick the best ones
Conclusion
My objective in this article was to help you understand how to approach SEO content development from a marketing perspective.
I know it’s going to make a big difference in your content’s performance and overall on your branding online. SEO is anyway a core part of marketing and branding these days and using it could definitely increase the strength of your brand and your sales numbers.
To achieve that though, you need to follow proven strategies that work and tools that have been developed on the basis of the best SEO content writing practices.
All the features explained above and the all the important points I’ve raised on the power of content marketing and not just writing SEO content, prove that with a tool such as SEMrush you have a much higher potential to increase your rankings on search engines.
Remember that when it comes to SEO it’s the quality of the content that differentiates strong brands from the rest. Investing in the right tools to help you do that will yield high returns in all aspects.
